by Tippi Hedren
Neil and Ron and I were in the kitchen when, in a matter of seconds, Neil went from docile cat to ferocious cat. It started with a growl, from the depths of his soul, and quickly escalated. His tail began twitching, his bloodred mouth opened to bare his stark white canines, and his huge paw wildly batted the air. Ron instantly recognized what was happening and shouted at me, “Get out of here!”
I ran to the living room, slamming the kitchen door behind me. Noel and our guests were already on their feet, startled by the commotion. Scared and helpless, we stood there frozen in place and listened to the impossibly tense showdown.
My impulse was “That’s not Neil. That’s not the docile, easygoing Neil who’s melted my heart.” But of course the truth was, it was Neil, as inherently wild as he was lovable, and it was insanity to pretend otherwise.
Ron described the encounter to me the next day. He’d faced Neil down, less than three feet away from him, his arms raised to make himself as big and threatening as he could, and kept yelling, “No! No! Leave it! No!” He had to win. A trainer has to win that fight. If the big cat wins the fight, their relationship has to end, or the trainer will never be safe with that big cat again.
After about two minutes that felt like an hour, Ron managed to penetrate Neil’s instinctive rage. Neil finally surrendered, tossing his head and mane, relaxing his mouth, and lowering his paw to the floor. His snarls softened to subdued muttering. Ron’s arms dropped to his side, while we eavesdroppers in the living room heard the roars and the yelling subside and tentatively exhaled.
After a quick round of apologies, a thoroughly embarrassed Ron walked his lion to the van and drove away. As I closed the door behind them, I heard Ron, purely for stress relief and not because he thought it would do a bit of good, giving Neil the scolding you’d give a brat. “What the hell were you thinking? Those are nice people! Why did you act like that in front of them?”
Once they were gone we poured our guests some nice strong drinks and toasted Ron’s amazing, educated courage . . . and Neil, primal and complicated in that magnificent body like all the big cats and, in the end, the inspiration for a passionate commitment that will be with me the rest of my life.
God bless that brave BOAC PR group, too, who didn’t hesitate to meet us a week later at Steve Martin’s Soledad Canyon compound to work with Steve’s two-year-old lion Boomer. Late in the afternoon Boomer was doing a photo shoot carrying a BOAC flight bag in his mouth. To demonstrate how unpredictable a lion’s possessiveness can be, Boomer decided that bag was his. When the shoot was over, he stretched out on the ground, flight bag between his teeth, and settled in, refusing to move and daring anyone and everyone to even think about trying to take it away from him.
It took Ron and his trusty van to end that stalemate. He tied one end of a rope to Boomer and the other end to the bumper of his van and literally towed that lion, bag still firmly locked in his mouth, back to his quarters for the night.
The BOAC team wisely forfeited their flight bag.
Despite the difficulties that the BOAC team witnessed, we were becoming more comfortable around the grown lions, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. After weeks of searching and networking on Ron’s part and ours, we finally acquired our first lion cub.
A doctor in the upscale, wooded Mandeville Canyon area of Los Angeles, who foolishly believed it would be chic to have a big cat as a house pet, had adopted a three-month-old cub from an animal park. The cub, named Casey, had behaved exactly like a baby lion, growing at an alarming rate and having a high old rambunctious time destroying the doctor’s house. He’d now been banished to the emptied-out guest house, where he lived alone, a very unhappy prisoner.
We were as excited to take that cub home as the doctor was to say good-bye to him. We drove home with me at the wheel and Melanie in the backseat with a very playful Casey, who spent the whole trip to Knobhill in her lap, gnawing on her hands and arms. He still had baby spots on his sides and legs, spots that typically disappear into a golden-amber adult coat at about nine months old or so. He also, of course, had paws the size of dinner plates, weighed about forty-five pounds, and was strong and adorable. It was love at first sight for all three of us.
It wasn’t love at first sight for Partner and Puss. They’d tolerated their isolation when Neil was visiting, and now here came another furry intruder. Casey wasn’t a physical threat to them yet, but at a foot tall, three feet long, and unpredictably zany, he was more of a handful than they cared to deal with. Their behavior toward him varied between avoidance and tolerance, and God bless them for everything they put up with over the years. As for Casey, he was perfectly content with all the attention he got from the new humans in his life, and if Partner and Puss didn’t care to be part of his fan club—oh, well, their loss.
Ron Oxley was exactly right. To really learn about big cats, there’s no substitute for living with them. From the moment we brought him home, Casey began giving us an education in Lions 101—what their various sounds and postures mean, just for starters. Even at three months, Casey made it very clear what mood he was in, and there was no doubt that this boy was going to live up to his title of “king of beasts” someday. He was very possessive of his nursing bottle, for example. He’d wrap his paws around it with an accompanying noise that sounded like “uh-huh, uh-huh,” heartwarming as could be. Any attempt to take the bottle away and that sound would come from deep inside his body, just as Neil’s adult guttural “uh-huh, uh-huh” was a signal of potential violence. Casey had an amazing “sound” vocabulary, from moans and grunts and growls to happy “aows” and hums. There was nothing haphazard about those noises—they all meant something, and part of our job was to learn to translate them.
Casey chose to sleep with Melanie in her bed, which she loved until the night I heard her let out a loud, piercing scream. I frantically ran into her room to find her clutching her thigh, in obvious excruciating pain. Casey was sitting on the end of the bed, looking up at me with the most innocent, angelic eyes I’d ever seen.
“He bit me!” she said in total shock.
“Why? What were you doing?” I asked her, almost as shocked as she was.
“Nothing! We weren’t even playing. He was sitting there, and suddenly he just bit me.”
Her skin was punctured and she was bleeding, although she and Casey were instantly friends again.
Two more lessons. Lesson number one: No matter where exotic cubs are being raised, their teeth are virtual petri dishes of bacteria, and antibiotics are essential if a bite punctures the skin. Lesson number two: If you live with big-cat cubs, being bitten is inevitable.
And we were just getting started.
One day I was driving up Knobhill just as Ron Oxley was driving down after a visit to the house. We stopped side by side, and he leaned out the window of his van with a huge grin on his face. “There’s a present for you in your bathroom. You’d better go take a look.”
I raced to the house and ran downstairs. There in my bathtub, curled up sound asleep on one of my sweaters, lay a tiny six-week-old cub—another excess baby from Lion Country Safari, where Casey had been born, it turned out. (Due to limitations on available space and money, zoos and animal parks often have to find alternative homes for big-cat cubs.)
I was cuddling our newest member of the family, a female Melanie named Needra, when Casey came ambling into the bathroom, took one look at this tiny lioness, and was so beside himself he nearly did backflips. Cubs desperately need companionship, and suddenly, here was a brand-new baby sister, just for him. They instantly became inseparable, playing together for the rest of the day until they wore themselves out and fell sound asleep beside each other.
By August of 1971, word was out that the crazy Marshall family in Sherman Oaks would provide a home for almost any healthy lion cub. Less than three weeks after Needra arrived, we had three more additions to our growing pride—Ike, Mike, and Trans. When they weren’t running and wrestling with each other all over the hou
se, they were playing with rubber dog toys we bought in the dim hope of distracting them from demolishing our furniture.
Another good lesson: Mike in particular thought tennis shoes were the best toy in the whole world. We found that enchanting, until we discovered the hard way that he found tennis shoes just as irresistible when someone happened to walk by wearing them.
Calls kept coming from everywhere to ask if we could please take another lion cub, or two, or three. A circus gave us Cindi, who had a broken leg no one had bothered to set, leaving her too crippled to be a desirable performer. Tiny Bridget, originally bought from a pet store, had been mistreated and arrived frightened and fidgety, tensing every time she saw a human. I wasn’t sure I could handle a larger crouching, jumping demolition team than we already had, so I put out the word to friends that we’d be delighted to share the endless joys of raising baby lions.
One eager volunteer was Luanne Wells, wife of Frank Wells, who happened to be president of Warner Brothers Studios. Frank drove to the house and picked up five-pound spotted, blue-eyed Trans to take home to Luanne, and we couldn’t have been happier—not about giving up Trans, but about the fact that at some point we were going to be looking for a studio to finance and release our movie. If Frank and Luanne fell in love with Trans between now and then, we just might have Warner Brothers in our hip pocket.
Even with all of us “supervising” them, even when we saw to it that the little lions spent as much time as possible in our fenced-in yard every day (praying all the while that our neighbors wouldn’t notice), the cubs couldn’t have been more destructive. Everything was a target for being torn to shreds, from pillows to our $3,000 sofa to the head of Emily’s mop while she was trying to clean. Bedspreads were favorites for tugs-of-war. We’d been smart enough to stow away our art objects to keep them from smashing to the floor during wrestling matches, but for the most part, nothing that wasn’t made of concrete survived that houseful of lion cubs.
None of it mattered in the end, though. I loved them, as did Noel and Melanie and the boys. They could melt my heart in the blink of an eye. One morning I was lying in bed, with little Needra curled up against my feet, sound asleep, when a loud sonic boom shook the house. She bolted awake, raced up my body to my shoulder, and buried her face in my neck, trembling. I held her close and whispered, “It’s okay, Neenie, it’s gone now, everything’s fine.”
I was hooked.
Incredibly, we managed to ignore the inevitable fact that in a few short years these cubs would be eight or nine feet long from their noses to the tips of their tails and weigh four or five hundred pounds. Our conversations about the future were limited to that “someday” when we’d begin shooting our film, with a cast of magnificent big cats we’d cherished since they were babies, big cats who, when they became adults, were capable of loving us one moment and killing us the next, without a second thought.
One day Luanne Wells called, apologetic but firm. Trans, now about three months old, was too incorrigible for them to handle, she said, and they were sorry, but they were going to have to return him to us.
“Of course,” I said. “I completely understand.”
I meant it. It didn’t surprise me. Besides all the obvious challenges of raising a lion cub, Trans had shown signs from the beginning of being tougher than most, with a perpetual “I dare you” look in his eyes and in his stance. He’d be a handful, but I was perfectly happy to bring Trans home to rejoin the pride.
At the same time, though, my heart sank. So much for the big-cat love affair we’d hoped for between Trans and the president of Warner Brothers, and so much for that studio giving our movie a home and supplementing the funds we’d raised, which to date were still hovering right around zero dollars.
It was less than a week later. We were getting Trans settled back in and recovering from what felt like a huge setback to the film when, out of nowhere, I got a call from our pal William Peter Blatty. He’d finished his manuscript of The Exorcist and wondered if I’d mind reading it. Are you kidding? After hearing the bare bones of it at his house on New Year’s Day, I couldn’t wait.
I couldn’t put it down. It was four a.m. when I read the last page of that book, and I excitedly woke Noel up.
“This is one of the most engrossing stories I’ve ever read,” I told him. “If you don’t sign Bill Blatty as a client, you’re out of your mind.” I knew beyond a doubt that The Exorcist was destined to be not only a bestselling book but a blockbuster movie as well.
Noel was continuing his career as an agent that summer, and he’d never heard me so excited about a book. Within days it was official—Noel was representing William Peter Blatty and his gripping novel about demons and priests. Included in the agreement was a clause stating that if and when The Exorcist became a movie, Noel would be the executive producer and guaranteed 15 percent of the profits.
Just like that, the hope that had ebbed away when Frank and Luanne Wells returned Trans to us with a resounding “No thank you!” came flooding back. It almost seemed like divine intervention. In exchange for all the big-cat cubs we were helping and everything they were putting us through, God was seeing to it that demons and priests would pay for our film.
Eight
It was inevitable. Disastrously inevitable.
One sunny October afternoon in 1971, our neighbor to the west was doing some gardening in her backyard when she looked up to see two lion cubs (probably Ike and Mike) peering over our fence at her, two big-eared tawny heads with amber eyes. From what I could understand of her semi-hysterical phone call, the cubs didn’t try to jump over the fence into her yard or threaten her in any way. But this was the same woman who’d called a few months earlier to say she’d heard a lion roaring at my house. If I’d eased her suspicions at all with my “that was a motorcycle” story, the game was definitely over now. She’d actually seen not one lion but two, about the size of full-grown German shepherds, and she wasn’t happy about it.
Sure enough, very early the next morning our doorbell woke us up. Noel answered it, fresh from bed, to find a uniformed Los Angeles County animal control officer standing there.
“Sir,” the officer said politely, “I heard you have some lions living here.”
In desperate need of a stall tactic, Noel managed to come up with “Excuse me, I’m not dressed. Let me get my bathrobe.”
He closed the door and sprinted downstairs, grabbing his robe while he whispered to me, “Wake Melanie up. The two of you need to get those cubs over the back fence.” As an afterthought he added, “But leave Bridget.”
Cut to Melanie and me boosting the rear ends of five cubs over the fence into the vacant lot next door and then following them right on over. I can only imagine what it must have looked like to any neighbors who happened to be awake at that ungodly hour as the cubs began cavorting around the vacant lot while two blondes supervised them, shivering in the early morning chill, dressed in nightgowns and coats and sporting some seriously challenged bed hair.
Noel, in the meantime, took nervous little Bridget to the front door, holding her in both hands and extending her toward the officer with a remorseful “Here you go.”
The officer looked at Noel, then at Bridget, then at Noel again.
“Forget it,” he said, and he was gone.
We were living on borrowed time in that residential neighborhood. We’d known that since Neil’s first visit; we just hadn’t addressed it yet and figured out what to do about it.
One afternoon about two weeks later I heard Partner barking, upset, letting me know that something was wrong. I ran to check on him and discovered that someone had left a door open, and Casey was gone.
I dashed out the front door to look for him, pulling it closed behind me to keep everyone else inside where they belonged, and saw him standing in the middle of the street, deciding what he wanted to explore first. My heart was in my throat as I walked toward him, trying to appear calm so he wouldn’t get alarmed and run. Then it hit me—I hadn’
t grabbed his lead, and without it I didn’t stand a chance of bringing him home. I darted back to the front door. Of course I’d locked myself out. So I ran around to the side of the house, through the gate and up the stairs to the unlocked kitchen door, taking up precious time I couldn’t afford.
Minutes later I was in the middle of the street, Casey’s lead in hand but no Casey in sight. Ron’s van was parked there. He’d gone with Noel to run an errand, leaving Neil behind in the van, and I said a brief prayer that Neil had not managed to escape, too, before I took a random guess and headed downhill toward the canyon road of Beverly Glen. It was five o’clock. Rush hour. Traffic was getting heavier by the minute, and countless hideous scenarios flashed through my mind as I began to run as fast as I could: Casey getting hit by a car; cars swerving to avoid him and causing a chain reaction of collisions; some poor elderly person having a heart attack at the sight of a lion the size of a well-fed cougar advancing toward them; some he-man hunter spotting him and immediately reaching for his rifle . . .
Finally I spotted Casey. He was in the middle of Knobhill, slowly but steadily approaching Beverly Glen. I yelled at him to stop, but he just glanced back at me with a quick “Oh, hi, Mom. We’ll talk later. I’m busy” look and kept on going, while I grew more frantic by the second.
Suddenly I remembered an interesting fact about big cats that Ron Oxley had told me one day. If they see a creature, including humans, who appears to be injured or infirm, they’re apt to zero in on it. An eternity of genetic dictate tells them, “Investigate that! It’s slowed down, so it may be food!”
I immediately affected an exaggerated limp and yelled at Casey again. He turned around to look, and this time he froze in place to stare, clearly intrigued. Still hobbling pitifully, I started back toward the house, making all kinds of deals with God if he would please just let this work.